Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/062292/06229935.000

Text File | 1992-09-22 | 4KB | 81 lines

                                                                                REVIEW, Page 72

THEATER

Made Glorious Summer


By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

    TITLE: Richard III
    AUTHOR: William Shakespeare
    WHERE: Brooklyn Academy of Music

    THE BOTTOM LINE: A brilliant actor and director find, in
a tragedy about the 15th century, relevance for the 20th.


    From the moment he appears onstage, uniformed and martial,
barking out "Now is the winter of our discontent" with the
guttural fury of a drill sergeant, Sir Ian McKellen's Richard
III is arrestingly cruel and humorless, all chill and absolutely
no charm. Not for him the leisurely glories of the play's
language or the seductions of direct address and droll comedy
to woo an audience. In a role that can epitomize the concept of
the villain one loves to hate, McKellen avoids anything lovable
or even approachable. This production, which has won raves from
London to Cairo to Tokyo and which opened a 16-week, six-city
U.S. tour last week, is an unrelenting portrait of the rise of
a dictator, assailing equally the tyrant and the rapacious
society that bred him.

    The show, produced by Britain's Royal National Theater and
staged by its artistic director, Richard Eyre, is modernish --
1930s -- in its dress and visual vocabulary. It is meant to
evoke 20th century memories ranging from Oswald Mosley's English
fascists to the Ceausescu and Marcos regimes. Yet it is entirely
faithful to the politics and psychology of Shakespeare's text.
No production in memory has better evoked the terrifying
instability of this buccaneer world. Rather than the embodiment
of motiveless malignity, Richard is simply a skillful and
ruthless practitioner of the techniques of his backstabbing
times. While invested by McKellen with all the understandable
self-pity of a man whose mother reviled him from birth for his
physical deformities and who contemplates death in the certainty
that no living creature will mourn him, this Richard is no less
reprehensible for being comprehensible.

    Eyre and McKellen share credit for devising a production
full of startling visual imagery. McKellen casually snuffs out
clumps of candles as he enumerates, deadpan, the friends and
relatives he means to kill. Richard's brother, the Duke of
Clarence, hunches in custody under a single, searing overhead
lamp in a scene eerily suggestive of all interrogations that
turn to torture. Most striking, the King's counselors sit at a
long table and talk in bureaucratic euphemisms about bloody
murders to be done someplace out of sight, while simultaneously
the crimes are being enacted in full view of the audience.

    Unfortunately, all these shrewd insights were muffled in
the American debut performance by the acoustic shortcomings of
the opera house at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Long sections
of dialogue were indecipherable even to those seated far
forward. Worse, the production -- which will tour to Wash
ington, St. Paul, Denver, San Francisco and Los Angeles this
summer -- is encumbered by a generally second-rate supporting
cast. Part of the problem may be in attracting top-quality
actors to so long a tour, for the standard is well below what
is customary on the National's stages in London.

    Eyre sought the tour in order to heighten his theater's
profile, not least in the U.S., where its lesser rival, the
Royal Shakespeare Company, is much better known. McKellen has
made it clear that he savors the family feeling of a tour and
welcomes the chance to proselytize widely for gay rights.
Fortunately for audiences, whatever their other agendas, the two
creators still see to it that the play's the thing.